1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to spoken dialog systems and more specifically to a system and method for dynamically adjusting components within a spoken dialog system according to network loads and other requirements to reduce hardware requirements.
2. Introduction
Any spoken dialog system, for example, to automate a call center, must operate on one or more compute devices such as a server. When a company desires to implement a spoken dialog system, one component of planning and implementing the system is a prediction of the number of calls that the system should be able to manage simultaneously. As the number of predicted calls increases, then more computer resources must be purchased and deployed to manage the load. The hardware costs of implementing such as system may make implementation of a spoken dialog system unaffordable.
Hardware costs in the initial acquisition and maintenance of a dialog system are an important consideration when planning call center automation with voice-enabled services. One common practice is to plan for assumed peak loads in terms of simultaneous users. Each user or caller into the system may be assigned a port. Hardware planning based on being able to manage peak loads is not cost efficient given that the average load might be significantly lower than the expected peak load.
What is needed in the art is a method for improving the efficiency of the use of computer resources when implementing a spoken dialog system.